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“I will see your houses as fireflies in the hollow of the hills”
From a tree-house is Diego Vallejo’s last project. Landscape appears again as th… Read More

“I will see your houses as fireflies in the hollow of the hills”
From a tree-house is Diego Vallejo’s last project. Landscape appears again as the main protagonist against a human being that is displaced from the image and can only be sensed through certain traces of light. From the idea of that house built on the tree and constituent of every child’s fantasy, which results in turn a space as perfect for the creation of fables as it is for the vigilance, Diego presents a group of paintings that shares exactly this both naïve and inquisitive look. This paintings show us houses, shelters and fragments of nature where there is always “something” that seems to be going to happen. These places, where human has been erased as in those empty streets of Paris portrayed by Atget that Benjamin identified with the photographs of the “scene”, come here from stolen screenshots of films scenes. The cinematographic sources in this case come from science fiction films and series. In this sense, the exploration of “other” places, which is a constant theme in Diego’s work, falls on a specific science fiction: the one that sweeps the paranormal and the strange along to the ordinary. They are not the delocalized and ahistorical moles that appear in other films of the genre, the germ of this topography comes from a look that exactly articulates the operation of making the ordinary become sinister, starting from the concept of unheimlich. In such a way that this place “other”, just like this “other”: the alien, they start from the same thing, from the things that we already know, those familiar things. From the absolute position of the observer, of the one who scrutinizes from the cabin or from the TV screen, we face precisely this window that remains open to our gaze. A window (as already metaphorized by Hitchcock in relation to our position of observers in Rear Window) that ends up turning all of us into a sort of voyeurs with a strong desire to see something happen. However, here the game is another one and the window appears blinded by the light in a double process in where we don’t reach to identify where that light comes from: does it emanate from the inside or is it one of this paranormal lights that comes from the outside? Is it a natural phenomenon or are they artificial lights? The light, that flash, that candle that watch and reveal, that sign of domestication, illuminates precisely all that doesn’t make it possible to see. These are lights that even if they seem common to us, they emerge as a light intentionally ambiguous in its direction: do they come from the outside or arise precisely in the very heart of those homes immersed in the silence of the night? This prominence the light gains reminds us of the close tie that exists between the occidental philosophy and the light as an enlightening, with its powers of image clarification and by the analogy of the mind; one tie fruit of the burden that is dragged by the West, where the view appears always linked with the idea of knowing, is again questioned and reformulated. The lights that somehow pack our imaginaries are already so diverse that work themselves as an importance element. Let’s remind those Thomas Ruff’s pictures of the Night series taken by infrared. A technology that right in those days we had just seen applied to the images that arrived to us from the Gulf War. Images, by the way, empty of human trace: deliberately unoccupied, politically unoccupied. So that in Ruff’s case that technologised gaze applied also to a common landscape turned it into a sort of target, a place inclined to be attacked. In Diego’s case, the technique is pictorial but the iconography in where this is supported makes an allusion to certain paranormal phenomenons that refer also to an invasive gaze. But when we find here this construction of the “other” as invasive it is perhaps for us to question ourselves how do we construct this “other” phantasmatic. The query that seems to be raised to us finally, mediated by that light, is the fact that this foreign invasion may come from this “forest of ourselves”, where the solitude is the invasion that covers the image as a patina; subtle evocation of these architectures of solitude painted by Hopper; just that this time is not the day but the night and they are its flashes the ones that prevail as solitude. Because, as Bachelard emphasized: “no matter how cosmic the solitary house becomes, illuminated by the stars of its lamp it prevails always as solitude”. Read Less

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“I will see your houses as fireflies in the hollow of the hills”
From a tree-house is Diego Vallejo’s last project. Landscape appears again as the main protagonist against a human being that is displaced from the image and can only be sensed through certain traces of light. From the idea of that house built on the tree and constituent of every child’s fantasy, which results in turn a space as perfect for the creation of fables as it is for the vigilance, Diego presents a group of paintings that shares exactly this both naïve and inquisitive look. This paintings show us houses, shelters and fragments of nature where there is always “something” that seems to be going to happen. These places, where human has been erased as in those empty streets of Paris portrayed by Atget that Benjamin identified with the photographs of the “scene”, come here from stolen screenshots of films scenes. The cinematographic sources in this case come from science fiction films and series. In this sense, the exploration of “other” places, which is a constant theme in Diego’s work, falls on a specific science fiction: the one that sweeps the paranormal and the strange along to the ordinary. They are not the delocalized and ahistorical moles that appear in other films of the genre, the germ of this topography comes from a look that exactly articulates the operation of making the ordinary become sinister, starting from the concept of unheimlich. In such a way that this place “other”, just like this “other”: the alien, they start from the same thing, from the things that we already know, those familiar things. From the absolute position of the observer, of the one who scrutinizes from the cabin or from the TV screen, we face precisely this window that remains open to our gaze. A window (as already metaphorized by Hitchcock in relation to our position of observers in Rear Window) that ends up turning all of us into a sort of voyeurs with a strong desire to see something happen. However, here the game is another one and the window appears blinded by the light in a double process in where we don’t reach to identify where that light comes from: does it emanate from the inside or is it one of this paranormal lights that comes from the outside? Is it a natural phenomenon or are they artificial lights? The light, that flash, that candle that watch and reveal, that sign of domestication, illuminates precisely all that doesn’t make it possible to see. These are lights that even if they seem common to us, they emerge as a light intentionally ambiguous in its direction: do they come from the outside or arise precisely in the very heart of those homes immersed in the silence of the night? This prominence the light gains reminds us of the close tie that exists between the occidental philosophy and the light as an enlightening, with its powers of image clarification and by the analogy of the mind; one tie fruit of the burden that is dragged by the West, where the view appears always linked with the idea of knowing, is again questioned and reformulated. The lights that somehow pack our imaginaries are already so diverse that work themselves as an importance element. Let’s remind those Thomas Ruff’s pictures of the Night series taken by infrared. A technology that right in those days we had just seen applied to the images that arrived to us from the Gulf War. Images, by the way, empty of human trace: deliberately unoccupied, politically unoccupied. So that in Ruff’s case that technologised gaze applied also to a common landscape turned it into a sort of target, a place inclined to be attacked. In Diego’s case, the technique is pictorial but the iconography in where this is supported makes an allusion to certain paranormal phenomenons that refer also to an invasive gaze. But when we find here this construction of the “other” as invasive it is perhaps for us to question ourselves how do we construct this “other” phantasmatic. The query that seems to be raised to us finally, mediated by that light, is the fact that this foreign invasion may come from this “forest of ourselves”, where the solitude is the invasion that covers the image as a patina; subtle evocation of these architectures of solitude painted by Hopper; just that this time is not the day but the night and they are its flashes the ones that prevail as solitude. Because, as Bachelard emphasized: “no matter how cosmic the solitary house becomes, illuminated by the stars of its lamp it prevails always as solitude”.

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“I will see your houses as fireflies in the hollow of the hills”
From a tree-house is Diego Vallejo’s last project. Landscape appears again as th… Read More

“I will see your houses as fireflies in the hollow of the hills”
From a tree-house is Diego Vallejo’s last project. Landscape appears again as the main protagonist against a human being that is displaced from the image and can only be sensed through certain traces of light. From the idea of that house built on the tree and constituent of every child’s fantasy, which results in turn a space as perfect for the creation of fables as it is for the vigilance, Diego presents a group of paintings that shares exactly this both naïve and inquisitive look. This paintings show us houses, shelters and fragments of nature where there is always “something” that seems to be going to happen. These places, where human has been erased as in those empty streets of Paris portrayed by Atget that Benjamin identified with the photographs of the “scene”, come here from stolen screenshots of films scenes. The cinematographic sources in this case come from science fiction films and series. In this sense, the exploration of “other” places, which is a constant theme in Diego’s work, falls on a specific science fiction: the one that sweeps the paranormal and the strange along to the ordinary. They are not the delocalized and ahistorical moles that appear in other films of the genre, the germ of this topography comes from a look that exactly articulates the operation of making the ordinary become sinister, starting from the concept of unheimlich. In such a way that this place “other”, just like this “other”: the alien, they start from the same thing, from the things that we already know, those familiar things. From the absolute position of the observer, of the one who scrutinizes from the cabin or from the TV screen, we face precisely this window that remains open to our gaze. A window (as already metaphorized by Hitchcock in relation to our position of observers in Rear Window) that ends up turning all of us into a sort of voyeurs with a strong desire to see something happen. However, here the game is another one and the window appears blinded by the light in a double process in where we don’t reach to identify where that light comes from: does it emanate from the inside or is it one of this paranormal lights that comes from the outside? Is it a natural phenomenon or are they artificial lights? The light, that flash, that candle that watch and reveal, that sign of domestication, illuminates precisely all that doesn’t make it possible to see. These are lights that even if they seem common to us, they emerge as a light intentionally ambiguous in its direction: do they come from the outside or arise precisely in the very heart of those homes immersed in the silence of the night? This prominence the light gains reminds us of the close tie that exists between the occidental philosophy and the light as an enlightening, with its powers of image clarification and by the analogy of the mind; one tie fruit of the burden that is dragged by the West, where the view appears always linked with the idea of knowing, is again questioned and reformulated. The lights that somehow pack our imaginaries are already so diverse that work themselves as an importance element. Let’s remind those Thomas Ruff’s pictures of the Night series taken by infrared. A technology that right in those days we had just seen applied to the images that arrived to us from the Gulf War. Images, by the way, empty of human trace: deliberately unoccupied, politically unoccupied. So that in Ruff’s case that technologised gaze applied also to a common landscape turned it into a sort of target, a place inclined to be attacked. In Diego’s case, the technique is pictorial but the iconography in where this is supported makes an allusion to certain paranormal phenomenons that refer also to an invasive gaze. But when we find here this construction of the “other” as invasive it is perhaps for us to question ourselves how do we construct this “other” phantasmatic. The query that seems to be raised to us finally, mediated by that light, is the fact that this foreign invasion may come from this “forest of ourselves”, where the solitude is the invasion that covers the image as a patina; subtle evocation of these architectures of solitude painted by Hopper; just that this time is not the day but the night and they are its flashes the ones that prevail as solitude. Because, as Bachelard emphasized: “no matter how cosmic the solitary house becomes, illuminated by the stars of its lamp it prevails always as solitude”. Read Less